e-mails

Last week, somebody contacted me about a problem they were having with Outlook:

"I work for a general contractor and have multiple projects going on. When I get e-mails pertaining to particular jobs, I place them in Personal Folders that I name with the job name. When the project is completed, I would like to move the folder onto my hard drive without losing the date.

"I have over 242 e-mails for one job alone. When I move them, they all come up with the date that I transferred them and the subject matter is gone. There has … Read more

Five years ago, Gmail launched with a splash big enough that many thought it was an April 1 joke: an entire gigabyte of online storage.

Larger online e-mail rivals Hotmail and Yahoo Mail quickly matched that advantage, but in the meantime, Gmail has grown to become a force to be reckoned with. It's got tens of millions of users, Google said, though it won't pin down a precise number. And its growth today, in terms of new users joining the service, is faster than it was four or five years ago, said Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail.

In a chat Monday, Jackson offered an assessment of what Google has accomplished with Gmail thus far and what it expects in the future.

CNET News: First of all, you launched Gmail on April 1. Are you going to have an April Fools' stunt this year? Jackson: Keep your eyes peeled. I can't tell too much. I can't spoil the joke.

The 1GB in-box was pretty surprising when Gmail arrived. Do you expect anything new from Gmail that's that shocking or paradigm-shifting? Jackson: We've been working on innovating Gmail over the last five years. It's our goal to stay constantly on the leading edge of what users want--particularly the most demanding users. When we added chat to Gmail, I considered that a big milestone. Similarly when we added video chat. I thought these were really important in expanding the scope of communications that Gmail makes fun and possible and easy and fast.

Communication is more than just mail. It was a really good ground for us to start on. We want to stay on that bleeding edge. Gmail Labs is a good testing ground to be trying new things and getting stuff out there to the public fast even at the scale we're at. It becomes difficult at the scale we're at, with a large user base, to launch things at the same speed as when you were small. We want to think of ourselves as the start-up that happens to have tens of millions of users.

I think we got a lot of that big bang at the original launch because of the gigabyte of storage. That was the hook that got a lot of people interesting in checking Gmail out, but then what got a lot of them sticking with the product were things about the UI (user interface)--conversation view and search and the quality of the spam filter. All those things that don't add up to the same headline, but they're the things that really make the product great. We're going to be going for more of that.

Do you think the difference between Gmail at launch and today is going to be less or greater than the difference between Gmail today and where it's going to be in five years? Jackson: Many of the things we've been working over the past five years were under-the-hood things. Things that don't dramatically change the visual look of the product but really people expect to have in a mail product. Things like POP support, IMAP support, a mobile UI. Little things like save draft or rich-text editing. We didn't have any of that at launch. You couldn't boldface, you couldn't italicize. We've been adding these things over the years that people just expect to have.

We've also been investing. The big change to our front-end infrastructure that we launched the year before last allowed us to have a larger number of engineers contributing to the code simultaneously and allowed front-end development to go a lot faster because of the new modular JavaScript architecture. It also made things like Labs possible because it allowed us to serve different modules of the code to different users. I view that as a huge enabling technology.

I think over the next five years you will probably see a large amount of visible change, maybe more so than in the past five years. That's because for the first five years we had to focus on all the nuts-and-bolts things people want. We did some very innovative thing in terms of chat and video chat and expanding the number of ways to communicate in Gmail. I think you're going to see more things in that direction, and things that directly impact the way the product looks and feels. … Read more

Freeware Xobni integrates into your Outlook installation and shows you more about your e-mails than Outlook can by itself. For each person who sends you e-mail, it shows you who else they frequently communicate with--their de facto social networks--and it also finds their phone number from inside their e-mails. It shows you all conversation threads you've participated in with the person, and all the attachments they've sent you. You can drill into message threads, and it has a snappy but redundant e-mail search engine built-in.

Xobni the app runs on Xobni the platform, which has hooks deep into … Read more

I was like you once. After fetching my e-mail, I'd open a message I wanted to delete, tap the trash-can icon, go back to the in-box, open another message, tap the trash-can icon, and on and on.

Then I discovered a killer shortcut: From the in-box, just swipe your finger across the message you want to trash, and then tap the shiny red Delete button that appears. Talk about a time-saver!

You can wipe multiple messages even faster by tapping the Edit button in the top-right corner of the screen, tapping each e-mail you want to mark for deletion, … Read more

Despite the many accolades the Peek received last year, we ragged on it for offering too little for too much, and we still stand by that original claim. Twenty dollars a month for only e-mail just did not seem worth it.

However, Peek has now released the Peek Pronto, which offers way more than just e-mail. Not only do you get push e-mail delivery, you also get Microsoft Exchange support, texting, PDF, and Word doc support, Search, and e-mail apps like weather, news, and maps. Other improvements include a larger font set and faster software speed. It also now allows … Read more

Gmail users can now select multiple attachments and add them simultaneously to an e-mail message. The new system simply opens your operating system's file explorer, and supports selecting of multiple files at once. Best of all, it includes a status bar for each file as it uploads (just like Flickr's Flash uploader does) to let you know how far along each file is. This can be comforting if you're adding a file that's close to Gmail's 20MB attachment limit, since you can see something other than a spinning loading icon. It also warns you if … Read more

A Republican congressman is calling on President Obama to ensure that all business-related e-mails from White House staff are appropriately preserved, including e-mails the staff sent from temporary Gmail accounts.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to White House Counsel Gregory Craig on Thursday, raising the concern that e-mails sent through personal accounts may not be retained.

"It is incumbent that the new White House implement policies and processes to minimize the risk of losing e-mail subject to the Presidential Records Act," Issa said in his … Read more

Zumbox is an interesting e-mail start-up based on the company's capability to create an electronic mailbox for every residential physical address in the United States.

The idea is that companies that send our paper statements--banks, utility companies, and so on--can now send those documents electronically. The benefits include lower environmental impact, security, and archivability of the messages. More importantly, service providers already know their customers' physical addresses. They can start delivering messages to users immediately, instead of trying to gather their customers' e-mail coordinates.

To sign up for the service, consumers go to Zumbox, enter their physical address, and … Read more

When I heard the news that Gmail was offering "Multiple Inboxes" as part of Labs, the first thing that popped into my head was "finally--now I can check multiple accounts from the same place!" Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Instead, Google's solution is simply to place the results from various filters and search queries off to the side of your main in-box. By default it sets you up with messages you've starred, and unsent messages from your drafts folder. This is nice and all, but you can hop to those two places … Read more